This past Friday night I went, with a few friends, to a drag show. Talk about people who live with abandon. Drag queens and kings lead such techno colored lives in spite of the fact that chances are pretty good that their paths have not been without more than their share of bumps.
As a younger person I lived with what I would have described as reckless abandon, but what I now realize was mostly just stupidity. Drug use, blackout drinking, a belief that "safe-sex" just meant having a padded headboard.
Now I see reckless abandon differently. It's taking a chance with your heart even though you're terrified. It's choosing a path that isn't practical but makes your soul sing. It's ignoring the self-conscious voice in your head that keeps you from saying or doing things that bring laughter to yourself or the friends and strangers around you.
That's what I did Friday night. There was a benefit going on at the show and I was the lucky winner of the first give-away. It was lube. I held that bottle up like it was Simba and announced to the room, "When Billi Casey wins lube....EVERYBODY wins lube."
The crowd loved it. People that we would have simply coexisted in that space and time with ended up being part of our group for the evening because the walls between strangers had been eliminated by ridiculousness and laughter.
How many times do we think things and not say them? Things that would have made someone laugh or smile or gain some confidence. Is it crazy to reach out to people that we share this ride with if it might make us look a little wacky? Or is it crazy not to?
In the name of love, I can't get enough.......POUR SOME SUGAR ON ME!!!!!
If my body is a temple......it's probably located in a bad section of Detroit. It started out fit and lovely and at some point I apparently decided to see just how much abuse it could take by filling it, over a period of decades, with drugs, alcohol and crap food and beverages, resulting in a sluggish brain and a bulky body that often make me feel older than I actually am. I'm starting here on my quest for improvement because I firmly believe that everything else that I want to change wagonwheels out from the fact that I feel like shit. There are places I'd love to go and things that I'd love to do but chose not to because I don't look and/or feel the way I would wish.
You might think that it would make sense to address the drug/alcohol issue before tackling what I'm eating and drinking. You would be correct, but for the fact that the "law and order" system of Illinois took care of those issues before you guys got here. In 2007 I had a bit of a misunderstanding with the law over writing my own prescriptions. Who knew they would frown so heavily on what I saw as "eliminating the middle man". They saw it as a felony.
I got probation and had to go to Narcotics Anonymous which is like Alcoholics Anonymous except for smart attractive people. At NA they convinced me that I had a problem but they didn't convince me that it was my fault. I grew up in the 70's when the entirety of the anti-drug campaign was one commercial where they'd show you an egg and tell you that was your brain. Then they'd proceed to fry it in a skillet and tell you it was you brain on drugs. I was already on drugs and I knew that wasn't my brain and I wasn't going to be taking advice from someone who was apparently more fucked up than I was.
I doubt if those ads kept anyone off drugs. They probably got a few pot heads out of the basement and off to Denny's for a Grand Slam Breakfast. I guess that's something.
So although my drug use was eliminated and my alcohol consumption downsized I, being the resourceful little minx that I am, managed to continue to abuse my body and mind in a damaging but completely legal way.
When I was growing up I developed a love/hate relationship with Pepsi products. They were the drink of choice in our home. I loved popping the cap off a bottle of Mt. Dew or Pepsi that had been in the freezer for just the right amount of time.
Not long enough - might as well have been in the fridge.
Too long - frozen and broken....it happened more than you'd think considering the fact that my mother admonished anyone who could have possibly been the offender to NEVER put another bottle of soda in that freezer.
I have several older brothers and sisters but they all either grew up in another family or were adults when I was adopted. The only exception was my sister Jan who sat on the window seat waiting on the day of my final adoption hearing hoping they'd come home without me. There was a family that lived on the corner, two doors up from us, who had eleven children. They drank tea, which I found disgusting. I was sure that at a certain number of offspring you must have to switch from soda to tea (you can't have everything) and was glad that we fell under that particular cut off.
While I loved the fact that, on any given day, soda was available to me, I despised the process that had to be endured to make this happen. At that time we, along with everyone else, got our soda in a cardboard carrier with eight glass bottles that, when empty, were returned to the store in order to get your deposit. We were much more involved in the recycling process back then.
My job was to haul the cartons of "empties" from the kitchen in the back of the house out to the car parked in front on the street. This was an arduous and embarrassing task. We never finished just one carton and took it back to get more. The process of return and procure always involved at least a dozen cartons and several trips. I felt like the whole neighborhood was sitting at their windows watching me through a slit in their curtain and feeling sorry for the Pepsi hauling kid.
"At least we're not drinking tea!!!", I wanted to scream.
I never felt cooler than when I mastered carrying two cartons by their handles and balancing another two on top of them.
I won't even go into the torture that occurred when we got back home and had to haul in the heavier, full bottles with their metal caps that would scrape and scratch you with their jagged edges. (I guess I went into it a little.) Carrying them in was far more work, but whomever took the first load inside knew that we'd be thirsty when we finished and to put a bottle in the freezer......when my mom wasn't looking.
I still have a love/hate relationship with Pepsi to this day. I love drinking it to the tune of several hundred calories per day, but I hate it and myself because I now have the knowledge that not only does it lack anything that could benefit me in any manner, it is doing damage to my health and making me feel mentally and physically sluggish. I continue to do it anyway. I started to google "harmful effects of soda consumption" but then called bullshit on myself. You all know that soda is poison so you are not in need of that information. I know it and believe it.
Guess why?
Last year I went for a month and drank nothing but water with meals and in between.
Guess what?
I felt FANTASTIC. I had energy, my aches and pains were greatly lessened and my hair and skin shone like the sun.
Guess what again?
After a month I decided to celebrate with a Pepsi and that was the end of that.
Stupid.
So in the interest of giving up soda and cutting back on stupidity I say.....POUR SOME WATER ON ME!!!!!!!
In the interest of full-disclosure I want to tell you that I was going to write this post about my deep desire to quit smoking. I was going to talk about how smoking was blackening my lungs and causing wrinkles around what would soon become my unkissable looking lips. I was going to tell you the story about how my Grandma Taylor burned a hole in my favorite outfit when I was three and how my sister Jo got ladybug patches and sewed them all over the outfit to cover up the hole which made it my double-favorite outfit but the emotional damage had already been done and how I now have a very similar ladybug tattooed on my left (just in case that's significant) foot. I was going to vow to put down the cigs, air out my house, Febreeze my car and start a new, smoke-free life. But I don't smoke. I've never smoked any more often than one or two, a few times a year when I'd be at the bar and be drunk enough to forget that I don't smoke. I was going to have a (very successful) blog and attempt at quitting something that I don't do to buy myself one more week with soda. So there ya go.
I saw this dog at the cafe at ICC. He was gorgeous. Soft. A soft in which you wanted to bury yourself. Alas he had a sign on him that said "Working Dog Do Not Pet". I understood, but it reminded me of something that I don't understand. Ladies...don't wear deep V, cleavage displaying tops and have a "hey you're a jerk if you don't look me in the eye" attitude. If I'm displaying the girls I'm fine with admiration for the exhibit. If you play your cards right, that exhibit may become "hands on" (don't laugh, it's a real thing). Mixed signals, especially purposeful ones, are so very unattractive at any age.
Ahhh, the words of my lord and savior Kris Kristofferson. There aren't many things in life that you really can't get out of.....taxes and death being the most famous.....and if you manage to avoid death for long enough then you can't get out of turning fi , fi, fif....L. L as in the Roman numeral for fi, fi, fi. I can't say the f -word which I know is ridiculous. Not saying it doesn't change anything. It's still half a century, two-thirds of an average life-span, a whole lotta shades of gray.
I turned forty-nine about a month ago and believe me I fretted (a word that people who are almost L use) about it for months. A good friend of mine told me to relax. She assured me that forty-nine was the new thirty-nine and when she did I realized something. She........is an idiot. As far as I can tell forty-nine is the same forty-nine it's always been. It's the forty-nine where hip hop leads to hip replacement. It's the forty-nine where after a night of sex everything is sore.......except your pussy. Let me pause here to explain that it's not completely the end of the world. Young, handsome guys still make my panties wet. Of course so does sneezing.
After my birthday came and went I realized that what I was freaked out about hadn't been turning forty-nine at all. It had been the fact that once I turned forty-nine nothing else stood between me and, well you know (I don't give two shits if it rhymes with nifty....it isn't). I had to face the fact that whether I did it kicking and screaming or with a positive attitude ~ chances were good that I was going to turn FIFTY.
So I've decided that, in the words of the great poet, I am going to "get into it". Fifty doesn't feel like the winter of my life. For me it feels like an Indian summer day in late fall. A day where you wake up and realize that it's beautiful out and life is full of possibilities and that you wasted a lot of summer days. I've had a lot of wonderful people and things happen in my life. Far too many for me to complain. But I've always gone through life in a haphazard kind of way. Making mistakes and putting out the fires that result, as opposed to making well thought out choices from the start. Having a very "play now, pay later" attitude most of the time. Living with a lot of chaos and crazy due to a lack of discipline and an apparent allergy to organization.
I imagine that this will be a journey much like the one we go through as we move through our teens and young adulthood and decide which pieces of our past we want to hold on to and which we have outgrown. It was a time when we fought hard to define ourselves and our relationship to the world around us and the people in it. It wasn't easy and you may wonder why I would decide to do it all over again. This is why... because this time I'm going to be doing it on my own terms. I'm going to edit and add and polish based on what will feed and fulfill me and the people that I love. I didn't have that luxury when I faced this challenge as a young adult. I had well-intentioned people in my life who made me feel that I couldn't be trusted to make my own choices. People that convinced me that dreams and goals did not eat at the same table. That if my choices were different from their ideals that love and approval would be withheld and maybe lost. Although I have the confidence and self-worth now that I didn't have then I don't expect this to be an easy journey, but this time it will be mine.
If I'm making this seem like it will be an arduous, boot-camp like experience let me apologize. Yes, some of my plans involve change and hopefully growth which, while worthwhile and satisfying in the long run, can be less than pleasant at the start. But it won't all be gut-wrench, soul-searching, angst-producing (book selling? lol) work. After all, there will be fun things to figure out. For example, through much sampling I hope, how to take care of skin that is L or how to ease my style into my new decade .
One last detail before I start the "making fifty fab" journey. I'm doing this on a very small budget. I'm sure that it would be less painful to ease into fifty with some Restylane, a fantastic new wardrobe and six weeks on the French Riviera being pampered by a cabana boy called Romareo, but how many women, myself included, can afford to do that? I hope that the fact that this is a blog about how to go gloriously into your fifties on a shoestring budget will make the process more interesting and appealing as opposed to less. Maybe I shouldn't have told you, but you'd have found out when my "How To Use Your Link Card For Good And Not Evil" post came out. ; )
I was not opposed to carrying cake....just Pepsi.
